Thomas Sowell Is My Hero

The next time a Senate hearing addresses the latest call for a rise in the minimum wage and the liberal Senators like Teddy Kennedy begin preaching at us... I wish (...and if I were King this would happen) the conservative Senators would call in Thomas Sowell to give us all a little class in economics.

Note: This guy is on the short list of people I want to meet before I die.

T Sowell writes:
Let us go back a few generations in the United States. We need not speculate about racial discrimination because it was openly spelled out in laws in the Southern states, where most blacks lived, and was not unknown in the North.

Yet in the late 1940s, the unemployment rate among young black men was not only far lower than it is today but was not very different from unemployment rates among young whites the same ages. Every census from 1890 through 1930 showed labor force participation rates for blacks to be as high as, or higher than, labor force participation rates among whites.

Why are things so different today in the United States -- and so different among Muslim young men in France? That is where economics comes in.

People who are less in demand -- whether because of inexperience, lower skills, or race -- are just as employable at lower pay rates as people who are in high demand are at higher pay rates. That is why blacks were just as able to find jobs as whites were, prior to the decade of the 1930s and why a serious gap in unemployment between black teenagers and white teenagers opened up only after 1950.

The net economic effect of minimum wage laws is to make less skilled, less experienced, or otherwise less desired workers more expensive -- thereby pricing many of them out of jobs. Large disparities in unemployment rates between the young and the mature, the skilled and the unskilled, and between different racial groups have been common consequences of minimum wage laws.

Where minimum wage rates are higher and accompanied by other worker benefits mandated by government to be paid by employers, as in France, unemployment rates are higher and differences in unemployment rates between the young and the mature, or between different racial or ethnic groups, are greater.

France's unemployment rate is roughly double that of the United States and people who are unemployed stay unemployed much longer in France. Unemployment rates among young Frenchmen are about 20 percent and among young Muslim men about 40 percent.